deeplyshallow // gone, baby, gone

gone, baby, gone

A few years back I started reading the crime fiction of Dennis Lehane. Lehane was making a name for himself the way Michael Connelly had done at first, so I latched on. Connelly has since been replaced by a large-typing flat-toned expressionless animatronic writer who publishes a book or two a year, each one more worthless than the previous, so Lehane’s books found me at just the right time. With the exception of the completely gimmicky Shutter Island, his books have been compelling and dark, and I’ve read each of them three or four times by now.

I started with Mystic River, back around the time it was starting to top the bestseller lists, and long before Eastwood announced that he was going to shoot it. I started digging backwards and found a short series that Lehane had written about a couple of private detectives who set up shop in the belfry of a Catholic church in a blue-collar Boston suburb, started with Darkness, Take My Hand, and I was hooked.

Gone, Baby, Gone was probably the most instantly accessible of the novels, in exactly the same way that Mind Prey was John Sandford’s most accessible of the Prey series: it takes a standard and familiar crime story, the abduction of a child, and spins a world up around it that is undeniably real. And that’s probably why, when I heard that Ben Affleck was going to direct it, I cringed. I’d long suspected that Good Will Hunting was more Matt Damon’s doing than Affleck’s, though I’ve never had any real reason to believe that that’s true. Affleck just struck me as the idiot of the two.

Turns out he might not be. Oh, it’s possible that he’s less of a writer than was once implied — he’s always partnered up for the writing credits — but as a director he’s not too shabby, and Gone, Baby, Gone is not only a very solid first major outing for a new director, it’s a damn fine crime story set in a very real Boston filled with very real people created by actors giving very good performances.

So let’s start with Boston. Gone benefits immensely from following in the footsteps of Mystic River, which carved out its own Boston. Gone, being of course from the mind of the same author, lives just around the bend from where the characters of Mystic grew up and lived their terrible knife-edge lives. Gone’s protagonists have rubbed shoulders with hard-working, hard-living people all their lives; they’re only a half-step ahead of that life themselves.

Which is why some of the casting feels all wrong to me. In Lehane’s Kenzie-Gennaro series — that’s Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro, the two leads — the private eyes are about a decade older than the actors who have been commissioned to play them. They’ve been down long and dark roads; they’ve seen things that have changed them and have changed the choices that they might once have made. Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan, who play Kenzie and Gennaro, respectively, don’t have the years or the wear and tear necessary to communicate these things. Instead they’re portrayed as a couple of detectives at the beginning of a career, two fresh faces whose only real unique contribution to the game is their own inside path, having grown up in Boston, right in the middle of the same rough crowds that run the city present-day. And it’s hard to buy, because they look so damned innocent all the time.

Which isn’t to say that they’re wrong for the part, because both of them play the roles perfectly. It’s only their appearances that work against them here. Affleck in particular is extremely good, striking just the right note as the guy who will do whatever it takes to do the right thing, even if he has to do a few wrong things to get there. Monaghan isn’t given an awful lot of screen time, other than in a sidekick role, or as Affleck’s foil now and again.

The supporting cast is excellent, although Morgan Freeman’s getting a little old-hat these days. He doesn’t seem to have much left in him that we haven’t seen fifty times before. Ed Harris is great as usual, full of intensity and life, which makes it terrible to watch Amy Madigan, who seems a hundred years older than Harris, whose face is drawn and pinched and ancient, leaving you to wonder how two married people — Harris and Madigan, in real life — can age at such drastically different paces.

The movie strikes a wonderful tone — one of grit, one that rings with complexities — and I have the urge to watch it a few more times. Like Mystic River, Gone, Baby, Gone defies the rules of the genre; both are less crime films than they are stories about ordinary people, and the terrible things that happen to them, or that they bring upon themselves. I’m dying to watch this one again.